While most people focus on Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org as being each other's competitors, there's a third player in this market: KOffice. While KOffice is obviously geared towards use on KDE, it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNOME-based distributions as well, making it much more platform-independent than Microsoft's Office suite. Version 2.0.0 was released today, and comes with a whole boatload of improvements.

"it's bad enough for a new user that some of the apps have overly vague names. kexi? krita? karbon?"

Well, you know, all the good names are already taken. MyPaint, YouPaint, TheyPaint, ItPaint, WePaint...

How about this; "KDE Office Spreadsheet", "KDE Office Wordprocessor", "KDE Office Collaboration Suite". Sure, it isn't sexy but at least the end user would have the vaguest clue as to the purpose of the application.

True, its funny given that the i used to stand for 'internet' as in, 'if you purchase this product you can get into the internet really fast' - that was back when (and still occuring today) where people think they must get on the internet, they don't know why, but apparently it is the 'next big thing' and they must be part of that 'big thing'.

With that being said, atleast it actually mentions what the purpose of the product is in the name, "iPhone", it's a phone, "iTunes" obviously something about music and playing it, "iMac" which used to be "Internet enabled Mac". Compare that to KOffice where there isn't any hint as to the purpose of the application in the name.

Those aren't names, those are descriptions mixed with vendor information. The descriptions are already shown in the startup menu of KDE, more prominently actually than the application name so you _already_ get those.

How about this; "KDE Office Spreadsheet", "KDE Office Wordprocessor", "KDE Office Collaboration Suite". Sure, it isn't sexy but at least the end user would have the vaguest clue as to the purpose of the application.

The purpose of each application forms the text of the menu entry via which you start the application.

e.g

Applications Menu --> Office ---> Kword Word Processor

I have Lancelot menu settings set to "Show categories inside the applet", so that the Applications menu button is left-most in the panel, in the position where on Windows you would find the Start button. So it is literally just three clicks to start up.

The application name (in this case Kword) and its purpose (in this case, Word Processor) are on separate lines of the menu, next to the menu icon. The menu icon is a pencil, writing out the capital letter "W".